Whoever said that sequels are rarely as good as the original clearly never passed that message on to Gareth Evans. One way or another, at least one of those phrases is going to pop up in your response to “The Raid 2”. Pick one or use all three, it makes no difference. (Spoiler: the human skull never wins.“Mind-blowing”. The Raid 2 is like an extended MythBusters on what surface wins when flesh and bone collide with inanimate objects. The hyper-violence is just as hyper-and the varied settings allow for a more diverse array of collisions between bodies and unyielding surfaces. As Rama, Uwais is the same blur of pugilistic punishment fans of the first film have come to expect. Of course, for all the subtle differences between the two films, the fight scenes erase any doubt of kinship. The results fall short of the operatic sweeps of a Kill Bill (or the films that inspired it), but they are another way in which The Raid 2 distinguishes itself tonally from The Raid: Redemption. (Unsurprisingly, red is popular.) And Evans seems particularly fond of pairing alternating shots of a mundane item (a bathroom stall lock, a brush handle) with impending mayhem (20 rampaging prisoners, 20 more rampaging prisoners). Freed from the tight, drab confines of the first film’s tenement building, The Raid 2 has a fair number of overhead and wide shots, all while throwing in the occasional bright splash of color.
Alas, Bejo (Alex Abbad), an up-and-coming gangster who looks unnervingly like Jason Schwartzman, is seeking to destroy the decade-long peace between the two established crime lords.īesides the unpacking of a more complicated plot, Evans uses his additional running time to let the cinematography breathe a bit. (The very fact I wrote the preceding sentence is evidence of how the sequel differs from the first film.) Soon, Rama finds himself about three right hands down from Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo), the mob boss who rules Jakarta along with rival boss, Goto (Kenichi Endo). Of course, eventually, events will persuade Rama to help Bunawar.įrom there, things get a bit more complicated. The head of an anti-corruption task force, Bunawar makes Rama an offer he certainly can refuse (for a while)-go deep undercover, cozy up to some high-level gangsters and discover exactly which cops are on their payrolls. Bruised and bloodied, Rama (Iko Uwais), our rookie cop protagonist, has dragged himself and two of the three survivors from the events of the first film to the one man Rama’s brother has assured him he can trust: Bunawar (Cok Simbara). The Raid 2 picks up immediately after the events of The Raid: Redemption. In fact, though the addition of “extras” like multiple locations, a larger cast of non-fodder characters and oh, actual dialogue, makes The Raid 2 much less unique a film than its predecessor, it still registers as a pretty vibrant entry into the Yakuza genre. (The film puts on about 50 minutes in the process.) As a result, Evans’ latest unwittingly serves as the converse of the adage, “Less is more.” More, it turns out, is indeed less-though not by much, and not to an extent that is likely to bother fans of the original.
Meanwhile, The Raid 2 spans more than three years and spreads the pummeling, slashing and occasional hammer-time throughout myriad locations. Shorn of pretty much everything else but the action, the plot unfolds in a brisk 101 minutes as an elite police unit tries to dislodge a crime lord from his 15-story, henchman-infested apartment building (and then tries to survive when the attempt goes awry). The Raid: Redemption can be viewed as a single, extended action set piece. While the hyper-violent martial arts maiming moments will elicit about the same number of appreciative chuckles as the first, in his new film, Evans has cast off the spatial and temporal constraints that so defined his earlier effort. Though its full title is The Raid 2: Berandal, Gareth Evans’ sequel to his 2011 beat-to-a-pulp-a-thon, The Raid: Redemption, could just as easily be called The Raid: Unfettered.
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